Global warning | 6 October 2007

When we were students, a professor of public health once told us that the death rate declined whenever or wherever doctors went on strike. This was an even stronger argument, he implied, than the purely ethical one against doctors resorting to such action, or inaction. No profession should lightly expose its uselessness to the public gaze.

Crossing Belgium recently, at a time when it had had no government for several weeks, I could not help but notice that it looked very much the same as when it did have a government. Obviously the crisis would have to be resolved sooner or later because otherwise people would realise the redundancy of the political class. According to one Belgian I met, the only real function of the latter is to vote a budget so that the bureaucrats got paid. For without a budget, how could their salaries and their numbers ever increase?

Of course, politicians are not the only flies in the ointment of modern society. There is the small problem of the people, too: they are constantly doing the most terrible things to one another and nobody seems able to stop them, not that anyone tries very hard.

A Belgian journalist told me that his nephew aged 15 had recently been stabbed in the throat by two young Ukrainian asylum-seekers (presumably they were fleeing democracy). It happened on his first day back at school and for some days he hovered between life and death.

At first, the Belgian newspapers expressed horror in a perfectly normal and straightforward way, but the journalist knew that it wouldn’t last in what is, after all, one of the most politically correct countries in the world. First a TV station was criticised for having shown the blood on the pavement where the boy was stabbed: we like our stabbings bloodless, it seems, like the murders in the detective stories of the golden age.